A SHORT FOREWORD
I'm afraid of losing great progress that has already been made in the past. While some sciences have advanced greatly in the last couple centuries, it seems a few eggs were dropped along the way (thank you romanticism) I cannot fully take credit, or much credit at all for my thoughts here: my arguments, reasoning, style, and process I owe mostly to Arthur Schopenhauer. He lived in another century, but never---barring Einstein, actually---has there been a writer I've read (not Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege, Kuhn, nor Popper) that had such a profoundly insightful and coherent philosophy. Schopenhauer had a complete system for understanding the world: not just a small corner of some particular aspect of a unified science (which follows from us living in a unified world, the physical laws of which don't seem to change at a fundamental level). Kant gets honorable mention here, but I find reading him tedious and frustrating, and as such I have only read a few of his works. Actually, there was only one of which I seriously studied (his Metaphysics of Morals) which was owing to the way some of its contents made my blood boil.
Also, shout-out to Descartes, but I mention him later anyways, so no worries.
REASON FOR WRITING
I'm mainly writing because of this: something said at the Adobe Keynote Meeting this year.
If you don't feel like clicking, here is a quick summary: This guy says that creativity and imagination are uniquely human traits. Obviously they're not, but here I explore how one can explain what separates humans from other species of animals.
THE RANT
This is bad science. I love Adobe products and I've
recently started to feel "empowered" like the initial presenter was
saying (towards the first ten minutes of the video), but this doesn't work. I have all the respect for Adobe because they've managed to
create a modular, multifaceted, interconnected, expressive, powerful,
coherent system of tools. Tools that aren't too hard to learn (I could
make better tutorials than exist if Adobe would be interested in testing such a
bold claim---I've seen most of what's on Lynda/LinkedIn and the
structure can be easily improved to help learning creative more quickly
develop their skills). Anyone who doesn't respect their accomplishments can't see far into the past nor the probable future.
That being said, Adobe is dope, but this is bad science and I want to explain in case anyone is interested.
The
first and most important idea---which is here, obviously
overlooked---is the defining characteristic of an animal: that which
knows.
Now, that might sound strange since teleology is often
misunderstood to have necessarily theological implications. "Teleology"
comes from the ... old some language for telos (I'm not a Greek or
Latin scholar, although I was a Korean linguist in the USN for six
years), roughly means purpose. Generally, this is how the parts of an
organism are explained: we think in terms of their purpose, first and
foremost. Teleological explanations shouldn't be banned from natural
science; however, divine teleological explanations should be banned
(here I'm speaking of science, I don't wanna start a fistfight about
your god or gods or lack-thereof).
Animals know and have
perception---no matter how primal---which means some sort of
representation of the world for itself. That is, it knows... something,
no matter how dim that knowing might be. That's what it means to be an
animal, at the foundation of the matter. This is the defining
characteristic for something to be categorized as an animal (note to
self: this implies that non-biological animals---that is ...
interesting, but off topic).
This is an interjection
of a supporting strange fact: dingoes---though many other animals do
this---harmonize with their vocal expressions (i.e., their howling, as
compared to a birds singing). They harmonize across multiple octaves:
they don't just copy: they can understand harmony between similar
patterns in sound-wave properties (i.e., they can harmonize across
multiple octaves, like I already said).
Additionally, as the
above line suggests: imagination and perception are inextricably linked.
Your perception is imagination constructed according to your
knowledge of context and the experiential, developmental neuronal
wiring that started happening from the moment you were born.
WHAT IS DIFFERENT IN HUMANS?
Well,
there are several, many of them are shared with other animals. It is
the ability of reasoning that was once ascribe as unique to humans;
that, and organized warfare, spite, envy, revenge, and even language.
However, all of these are shared with other animals of sorts. If you're
curious about the organized warfare I'm thinking of, it's groups of
chimpanzees (if I recall correctly; really, some sort of ape or monkey).
What
separates us is an instinct for experimentation, exploration, and
conscious expression of our thoughts in the form of verbalization in
combination with the highly unique prefrontal cortex and our extreme
(compared to other animals) nervous system developmental capacity.
As
the scale goes from primal to nature's master work: the human brain (at
least on this planet), it starts with the simplest of perception,
perhaps touch. Then, it works it's way up to what most mammals have: an
immediate perception (however dull) of a world, and beyond.
Now, when you get
to primates (birds or other animals of prey are also of important
note), that's when you get highly-developed perceptions of the world:
imagination of *objects beyond objects*, obscured, temporarily hidden.
The realm of understanding that---to some extent---delusions, illusion,
mistakes, tricks of the light, are not the "real world." That is, the
problem of what is "real" and what is "mere perception" (i.e., "ideal"
is the proper philosophical term for this notion---this is because it's
already agreed upon that imagination and perception are joint
functions). This is Descartes problem of the Ideal and the Real which sparked so much debate for centuries beyond his death in the 16th
century. To summarize him: "Yo, if this is all real how come no one can provide a proof that it isn't just a dream? I mean, the stuff of dreams seems real in the moment, but comparing memories of dreams to the memories of perceptions of reality (okay now I'm interjecting A LOT of Schopenhauer here, and also this is what Kant (I think?) called "the long dream," though perhaps it was another author.) We have perceptions in dreams (i.e., we imagine existing in a world)
THE SHORT VERSION
If anything gave rise to civilization it was tendency to cooperate and
share thoughts (i.e., communicate); HOWEVER the point I really want to
make is that our uniqueness comes from a HARMONIOUS CONSTELLATION of
highly-developed, biologically-rooted traits that combine well with our
environment.
This is a simple to analogy to what I mean above: THE LEAD SINGER does not = THE BAND (unless, of course, they're one person with a guitar calling themselves by a band name or something).
As a parting question: If my dog isn't capable of imagining, why's he barking, pawing, etc. in his sleep?
